The Parents' Review

A Monthly Magazine of Home-Training and Culture

Edited by Charlotte Mason.

"Education is an atmosphere, a discipline, a life."
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Ruskin on Education

read by Mrs. FirthVolume 11, 1900, pgs. 520-533

"Ruskin on Education" is a very large subject, and, of course, only a
small part of it can be dealt with on the present occasion. He
was a very early advocate of compulsory education, of hand labour, of
technical instruction, and of the teaching of natural history: he has
left a detailed account of his own education, and an ideal scheme of
education for his ideal Society of St. George. He did much actual
teaching in his life, besides that of his books and his Oxford
lectures; he was always ready to share his mental gains, he taught
people to see, he knew how to excite interest and enthusiasm, and
travellers especially in Florence, Venice, and Amiens, owe much to his
guidance. Some persons are offended by being told in his books
about these places that if they do not honestly admire such and such a
picture, or fresco, they had better go shopping or otherwise divert
themselves, for the essential faculty of enjoying good art is wanting
in them; while others feel that he may be right, and try to form their
taste on what he declares to be works of noble art.

It is not, then, to be expected that I should present his views in
completeness, or that I should give Ruskin revised, or Ruskin
criticized, but rather some of his most characteristic and leading
utterances, the selection, no doubt, half-unconsciously influenced by the
feelings of a friend, not an antagonist.

It is quite easy for anyone who tries, and even without much trying, to
find numerous superficial inconsistencies in his statements, petulancy
in many of his protests, exaggerated ways of putting things, arising
from his own vehement perception, and absolute (often aggressive)
candour--fanciful and fantastic passages, which are really a little
paradoxical play, never intended to be taken with utter
seriousness. He adds to the sternness of a moralist the
sensitiveness of a true artist, whose perception of beauty is
accompanied by an equally keen perception of ugliness. To him, our
squalid streets, dustheaps for children's playground, hideous
buildings, smoke-laden air, and polluted streams, are produced by
diabolic agency; no language is too strong for his reprobation of the
men who tolerate them, and he asserts fine art to be impossible in such
a country. Can we not understand how the thoughts of the
poet-seer recoiled from these realities, how they turned again and
again to a remedy, to ideal education in pure air, to beautiful
opportunities for happy children of all classes, even to the details of
graceful dancing, seemly dress, and gladness of song?

"Education, briefly, is the leading of human souls to what is best, and
making what is best out of them: and these two objects are always
attainable together, and by the same means; the training which makes
men happiest in themselves also makes them most serviceable to other."

Many years ago John Ruskin wrote this, and combated the prevalent idea
that erudition was education, and so early as 1862 he urged that every
child should be imperatively taught in Government training schools,
together with other minor pieces of knowledge, with the best skill of
teaching that the country could produce, the following three things:--

(a) The laws of health, and the exercises enjoined by them.
(b) Habits of gentleness and justice.
(c) The calling by which he is to live.

Connected with these training schools were to be Government workshops,
where any man, woman, boy or girl, out of employment, should be given
work--if incapable through ignorance, taught, if through sickness,
tended--if objecting to work, set to the more painful forms of
necessary toil.

A few years later he writes, "It should be part of my scheme of
physical education that every youth should learn to do something finely
or thoroughly with his hands, so as to let him know what touch meant,
and what stout craftsmanship meant: and to inform him of many things besides, which no man can learn
but by some severely accurate discipline in doing." There were no
Arts and Crafts then! No technical schools or classes! He
goes on to say the result would be, amongst other things, the increase
of innocent domestic price and pleasure, and the extinction of a great
deal of vulgar upholstery and other mean handicraft.

He declares that he himself is more set on teaching healthful industry
than anything else as the beginning of all redemption. In
dwelling on education of a noble kind, he write, of "true and refined
scholarship of which the essential foundation is to be skill in some
useful labour."

Again, "The character of men depends more on their occupations than on
any teaching we can give them. The employment forms the habits of
body and mind, and these are the constitution of the man.
Employment is the half and the primal half of education--it is the warp
of it; and the fineness or the endurance of all subsequently woven
pattern depends wholly on its straightness and strength. The real
and noblest function of labour is not to be reformatory, but formatory."

A point that Ruskin urges very strongly is that all measures of
reformation are effective in exact proportion to their
timeliness. We are too much accustomed to allow conditions of
life to exist which make health impossible, and to build infirmaries
for a few of the victims of these conditions: and to allow people to be
drawn into crime by irresistible temptation which we might have
removed: "we leave the most splendid material in child nature to wander
neglected about the streets until it has become rotten, the degree in
which we feel prompted to take in interest in it." On this point
of timeliness, prevention being better than cure, one is reminded of a
passage in an interesting book, by a recent writer, about the lowest
stratum of London life. Tilda, the heroine, is raised by her
contact with a higher nature, but falls back again, to her own
despair. "I'm in the gutter," she says pitifully, "I can't git
out. Why didn't yer catch me when I was a kid?"

"It is a marvel to me," writes Ruskin, "How the race resists, at least
in its childhood, influences of ill-regulated birth, poisoned food,
poisoned air, and soul neglect. I often see faces of children
through the black dust of St. Giles (London) which through all their
pale and corrupt misery recall the old "Non Angli," [non angli, sed angeli--St. Gregory said, made upon meeting children from England in the slave market at Rome--'not Angles, but Angels.'] and recall it, not by
their beauty, but by their sweetness of expression, even though signed
already with trace and cloud of the coming life, a life so bitter that
it would make the curse of the 137th Psalm true upon our modern
Babylon, though we were to read it thus: 'Happy shall thy children be,
if one taketh and dasheth them against the stones.'"

Ruskin has always urged the teaching of natural history. "I
hope," he says, "to see some day natural history assume a principal
place in our simplest codes of school instruction, so that our peasant
children may be taught the nature and uses of the herbs that grow in
their meadows, and may take interest in observing and cherishing,
rather than in hunting or killing, the harmless animals of their
country." Drawing is to be taught in this and other connections
to help and fix observation. "In the degree in which we delight
in the life of any creature, we can see it--no otherwise." He says,
"For one man who is fitted for the study of words, fifty are fitted for
the study of things, and were intended to have a perpetual, simple and
religious delight in watching the processes and admiring the creatures
of the natural universe." And again, "I have reached only by
thirty years of labour the conception of a system of Education in
Natural History, the realization of which can only be many a year after
I am at rest."

He writes: "All education must be moral first: intellectual
secondarily. It may be a question how long and to what extent boys and
girls of fine race may be allowed to run in the paddock before they are
broken; but assuredly, the sooner they are put to such work as they are
able for, the better." He dwells much on Wordsworth's line--

"We live by admiration, hope, and love."

"These are to be taught by the study of beautiful Nature, the sight and
history of noble persons, and the setting forth of noble objects of
action."

He thus expands them:--"Admiration--the power of discerning and taking
delight in what is beautiful in visible form, and lovely in human
character; and necessarily striving to produce what is beautiful in form, and to become what is lovely in
character. Hope--the recognition by true foresight of better
things to be reached hereafter, whether by ourselves or others,
necessarily issuing in the straightforward and undisappointable effort
to advance according to our proper power, the gaining of them.
Love--both of family and neighbour, faithful and satisfied."

"When," he asks, "do you suppose the education of a child begins?
At six months old it can answer smile with smile, and impatience with
impatience. It can observe, enjoy, and suffer, acutely and in a
measure, intelligently. Do you suppose it makes no difference to it
that the order of the house is perfect and quiet, the faces of its
father and mother full of peace, their soft voices familiar to its ear,
and even those of strangers, loving; or that it is tossed from arm to
arm, among hard or reckless, or vain-minded persons, in the gloom of a
vicious household, or the confusion of a gay one? The moral disposition
is, I doubt not, greatly determined in those first speechless
years. I believe especially that quiet, and the withdrawal of
objects likely to distract, by amusing the child, so as to let it fix
its attention undisturbed on every visible least thing in its domain,
is essential to the formation of some of the best powers of
thought." He attributes Scott's perceptiveness and memory to this
quietude of his home, and we shall see something of the same influence
as we come to John Ruskin's own education.

He fully describes it:--At four years old he had no toys, but had to
find his own amusement; his Aunt at Croydon, "pitying this monastic
poverty, bought a radiant Punch and Judy all dressed in scarlet and
gold, that would dance tied to the leg of a chair;" his mother was
obliged to accept them, but afterwards quietly told him it was not
right that he should have them, and he never saw them again. He
had a bunch of keys to play with as long as he was capable only of
pleasure in what glittered and jingled. As he grew older he had a
cart and a ball, and when he was five or six, two boxes of well-cut
wooden bricks.

He writes; "With these moderate, but I still think entirely sufficient
possessions, and being always summarily whipped if I cried, did not do
as I was bid, or tumbled on the stairs, I soon attained serene and
secure methods of life and motion, and could pass my days contentedly
in tracing the squares of comparing the colours of my carpet, or
counting the bricks in the opposite houses; with rapturous intervals of
excitement during the filling of the water cart through its leathern
pipe from the dripping iron post at the pavement edge, or the still
more admirable proceedings of the turncock when he turned and turned
till a fountain sprang up in the middle of the street."

But the carpet, and patterns in dresses, bed covers or wall papers,
were his chief resource, and his attention was soon so accurate that
when at three and a half he was taken to have his portrait painted by
Mr. Northcote, he had not been ten minutes alone with him before he
asked why he had holes in his carpet. It was at this time that
the painter enquired what he would like in the distance of this
picture, and the child answered "boo hills."

His father had so much confidence in the mother's judgment that he did
not venture to help, much less to cross her; he used to tell him a
story sometimes, and in the evening he read aloud the Waverly novels,
while the child sat in a little recess with a table in front of it like
an idol in a niche, the mother knitting. Mr. Ruskin, senior, was
a man of true literary taste and perception, and his reading aloud was
remarkably good and sympathetic.

The mother early began a severe course of Bible work with her son, and
read alternate verses with him, watching every intonation of his voice
and correcting the false ones. They read two or three chapters a
day straight on, the first thing after breakfast, no interruption
allowed from servants of visitors, visitings or excursions except when
actually travelling. He gives a list of the chapters he had to
learn by heart, and he had also to commit to memory "the whole body of
the fine old Scottish paraphrases, which are good, melodious, and
forceful verse, to which, together with the Bible itself," he owed the
first cultivation of his ear in sound.

He writes: "Though I owe not a little to the teaching of many people,
the maternal installation of my mind in that property of chapters I
count very confidently the most precious, and on the whole the one
essential part of all my education, for the chapters became, indeed,
strictly conclusive and protective to me in all modes of thought, and
the body of divinity they contain acceptable through all fear or doubt, nor through any fear or doubt or fault have I ever lost my loyalty to
them, nor betrayed the first command in the one I was made to repeat
oftenest--'Let not Mercy and Truth forsake thee.' "

The boy grew up in an atmosphere of peace, he heard no angry word, saw
no offended glances, no trouble or disorder in the household. Next to
this quite priceless gift of peace, he received perfect understanding
of the natures of obedience and Faith; he obeyed word or lifted finger
of father or mother simply as a ship her helm; not only without idea of
resistance, but receiving the direction as a part of his own life, a
force or helpful law as necessary to him in every moral action as the
law of gravity in leaping. And his practice in Faith was soon complete;
nothing was ever promised him that was not given, nothing ever
threatened him that was not inflicted, nothing ever told him that was
not true. Peace, obedience, and faith, these three for chief good, next
to these the habit of fixed attention with both eyes and mind. Lastly,
an extreme perfection of cake, wine, comfits, &c., and by fine
preparation of what food was given him.

But he was too solitary, too sheltered from endurance and without due
social discipline for the teaching of good manners. His mother was shy,
and the couple lived a life of great retirement. Also his powers of
independent judgment and action were entirely undeveloped. He writes:
"Children should have their times of being off duty, like soldiers, and
whence once the obedience if required is certain, the little creature
should be very early put for periods of practice in complete command of
itself, set on the bare-backed horse of its own will, and left to break
it by its own strength." His further verdict on his own education was
that it was at once too formal and too luxurious, leaving his
character, at the most important moment for its construction, cramped
indeed but not disciplined, and only by protection innocent, instead of
by practice virtuous.

He was taken to see ruined abbeys and castles, and noble cathedrals
when his father made tours through half the English counties for orders
for his firm; no gentleman's or nobleman's house of interest which
could be seen was left unvisited, and when the boy was old enough to
care for what he himself delighted in, his father, who had a quite
infallible natural judgment in painting, never allowed him to look for
an instant at a bad picture.

Later the boy went abroad with his parents, posting leisurely, and
seeing beautiful places with intense enjoyment, gaining first
impressions which were to be deepened in all his future life.

He writes on one occasion, when reviewing his early years, that we
scarcely ever, in our study of education, ask this most essential of
all questions about a man, what patience had his mother or sister with
him, that most men are apt to forget it themselves, that it is only by
deliberate effort that he can recall the long morning hours of
toil--toil on both sides equal--by which year after year his mother
forced him to learn the Scotch paraphrases and chapters of the Bible.
"I recollect" (he writes) "a struggle between us of about three weeks
concerning the accent of the 'of' in the lines--

'Shall any following spring revive
The ashes of the urn?' "

--I insisting, partly in childish obstinacy, and partly in true
instinct for rhythm (being wholly careless on the subject both of urns
and their contents) on reciting it, 'The ashes of the urn.' It was not,
I say, till after three weeks' labour that my mother got the accent
laid upon the 'ashes' to her mind. But had it taken three years she
would have done it, having once undertaken to do it."

Ruskin, in later life, not only gave teaching, but, as we all know,
books, pictures, minerals, and educational help of all kinds. He was
willing to forego the exercise of his own faculty and pleasure in
painting, that he might bring others to see what he rejoiced in, and to
understand what he had deciphered, whether they were working men,
little school girls, struggling artists, or individual friends; and his
condition of companionship in his Society of St. George is, that after
we have done as much manual work as will earn our food, we all of us
discipline ourselves, our children, and anyone else willing to be
taught, in all the branches of honourable knowledge and graceful art
attainable by us. His ideal society was to be entirely devoted,
first to the manual labour of cultivating pure land and guiding streams
to places needed, and together with manual labour, and much by its
means, to carry on the thoughtful labour of true education in
themselves and others, to learn and teach all fair arts and sweet order
and obedience of life, and to educate the children entrusted to their
schools in such practical arts and patient obedience, but not at all
necessarily in either arithmetic, writing, or reading.

Before entering on Ruskin's ideal scheme of education for the children
of St. George's Schools, it is necessary to explain that he founded the
Company or Guild of St. George because he could not bear to see
degradation and wretchedness without making some effort to relieve
it. "How are we to live?" he asks. "Surely not in
multitudinous misery. Do you think the Maker of the world
intended all but one in a thousand of His creatures to live in these
dark streets, and the one triumphant over the rest to go forth alone
into the green fields?" And again, at the time of the Commune in
Paris, "Alas! of these divided races, of whom one was appointed to
guide and teach the other, which has indeed sinned deepest--the
unteaching or the untaught?--which are now guiltiest--those who perish
or those who forget?"

So his plan was this: To possess land, to cultivate it by hand labour,
possibly to redeem some, and to leave some uncultivated for the
security and preservation of wild creatures and wild flowers, to have
on the land well-housed men and women, and schools for the education of
their children. The laws and regulations for this education are all
that concern us now, and I must, in a few words, dismiss the subject of
the Guild. Its members, or Companions as they were called, are
few. The Master gave £7,000 for its work, they contributed some
£700 approximately, he gave a choice Museum to Sheffield, and some of
his friends made donations of land. The society never seemed to
accomplish much in agriculture, there were failures over which it was
easy for outsiders to make merry, and there were some few ill-judging
persons who caricatured the Master's teaching by their exaggerations or
misunderstanding, and so brought it into discredit. As has been
well said of such persons, they "spoil the beauty which depends upon
proportion." Many of the wise and strong whom the Master thought
would join our ranks and stand shoulder to shoulder in his work for the
redemption of their fellows, held aloof, and though he kept on his way
with generally indomitable will, and stern rather than glad
hopefulness, his work was not made easy, and it must often have been
done in disappointment and heaviness of heart. Though Browning is
no doubt right in saying, "'tis not what man Does which exalts him, but
what man Would do," it is still sad to think how little help Ruskin had
in this special scheme.

However, failures are easily estimated. It is less easy to
estimate the good done in countless homes by his appeals for a higher
standard of duty and culture, and to judge how far the future may
justify his ideal. Some coming brightness may shine with "the
radiance his deed was the germ of."

"We will train," he wrote, "as many British children as we can in
healthy, brave and kindly life, to every one of whom shall be done true
justice and dealt fair opportunity of advancement, or what else may be
good for them. Justice in granting to every human being due aid in the
development of such faculties as it possesses for action and
enjoyment--primarily for useful action, as all enjoyment must arise out
of that, either for happy energy or rightly complacent and exulting
rest. Due aid, let the rough ground remain rough, properly looked
after and cared for, it will be of best service so, but spare no labour
on the good, or on what has in it the capacity of good."

He said that we must accept contentedly infinite difference in original
nature and capacity, and that right education would make this
manifest. Not by competitive examinations. Sternly, no! but
under absolute prohibition of all violent and strained effort,
specially of envious or anxious effort, in every exercise of body and
mind. The best powers of the youths were to be developed in each
without competition, though they would have to pass crucial but not
severe examinations, attesting clearly to themselves and to other
people, not the utmost they can do, but that they can do some things
accurately and well, with clear and happy certainty that there are many
things they will never be able to do. He is clear that healthy
working will always depend on total exclusion of competition. Every child should be measured by its own standard,
trained to its own duty, and rewarded by its just praise. It is the
effort that deserves praise, not the success, nor is it a question for
any student whether he is cleverer than others or duller, but whether
he has done the best he could with the gifts he has. He deplores the
madness of the modern cram and examination system, because all men are
not equal, the fact being that every child is born with an accurately
defined and absolutely limited capacity; by competition he may paralyze
or pervert his faculties, but cannot stretch them a line; and the
entire grace, happiness, and virtue of his life depend on his
contentment in doing what he can dutifully, superiority to be used for
the help of others, inferiority to be no ground of mortification. He
would fain see engraved in marble over the door of every school, and
the gate of every college, the words, "Let nothing be done through
strife or vain glory." "Prizes and honours are meant by heaven to be
the proper rewards of a man's consistent and kindly life, not of a
youth's temporary and selfish exertion." Dulness also in his scheme is
not to be disturbed by provocations or plagued by punishments. The
virtue of humility is to be taught to a child chiefly by gentleness to
its failures. "I have seen," he writes, "my old clerical master beating
his son Tom hard over the head with the edge of a grammar because Tom
could not construe a Latin verse, when the Rev. gentleman ought only
with extreme tenderness and pitifulness to have explained to Tom that
he was not Thomas the Rhymer. But the master should be swift to
recognize the special faculties of children no less than their
weaknesses, and it is his quite highest and most noble function to
discern these and prevent their discouragement or effacement in the
vulgar press for a common prize."

Though the children in St. George's Schools are not to be taught to
read unless they like, it seems to be taken for granted that the
majority of them will like, for the are to learn Latin, boys and girls
both, natural history, the history of five cities, and elementary
music. Their minds are to be stored with what has been beautifully and
bravely done, and they are to learn by heart not less than 500 lines of
such poetry as would always be helpful and strengthening to them. They
are to learn beautiful writing and beautiful speaking, and to listen,
if they are interested, to good reading aloud, and good music. And none
must fail to learn gentleness to all brute creatures, accuracy of
observation and of statement, finished courtesy to each other, the laws
of honour, and the habit of truth.

Our farmers' children, with our own, are to be "enabled to know the
meaning of the words, Beauty, Courtesy, Compassion, Gladness,
Religion," and each of these subjects is taken up separately.

We may pause on one of them--Gladness. Ruskin long before had written:
" The last and worst thing that can be said of a nation is that it has
made its young girls sad and weary." And later he says: "All
literature, art and science are vain, and worse, if they do not enable
you to be glad, and glad justly." He considers "cheerfulness inseparable from good breeding, debonnairte, disciplined in courtesy, and the exercises which develop animal power and spirit."

He dwells much on frankness, and says: "There is no fear for any child
who is frank with its father and mother." We may see throughout, his
confidence in the unspoiled tendencies of children to be consistent
with his words: "I trust in the nobleness of human nature, in the
majesty of its faculties, the fullness of its mercy, and the joy of its
love" So much the more scathing are his reproaches to those who should
help their development and do not. So much the more solemn his
warnings. He writes: "The whole period of youth is one essentially of
formation, edification, instruction, I use the words with their weight
in them; intaking of stores, establishment in vital habits, hopes and
faiths. There is not an hour of it but is trembling with destinies--not
a moment of which, once past, the appointed work can ever be done
again, or the neglected blow struck on the cold iron. Take your vase of
Venice glass out of the furnace, and strew chaff over it in its
transparent heat, and recover that to its clearness and rubied glory
when the north wind has blown upon it: but do not think to strew chaff
over the child fresh from God's presence and to bring the heavenly
colours back to him--at least in this world."

"A child should not need to choose between right and wrong. It should
not be capable of wrong; it should not conceive of wrong. Obedient as
bark to helm, not by sudden strain or effort, but in the freedom of its
bright course of constant life; true with an undistinguished, painless,
unboastful truth, in a crystalline household world of truth; gentle,
through daily entreatings of gentleness and honourable trusts, and
pretty prides of child-fellowship in offices of good; strong, not in
bitter and doubtful contest with temptation, but in peace of heart and
armour of habitual right, from which temptation falls like thawing
hail; self-commanding, not in sick restraint of mean appetites and
covetious thoughts, but in vital joy of unluxurious life, and
contentment in narrow possession, wisely esteemed."

It is the fashion amongst certain advocates of the advanced education
of women, to smile at and despise the Sesame and Lilies type of woman,
but I think they do not take the book as a whole. Ruskin combats the
idea that woman is the shadow and attendant image of her lord, owing
him a thoughtless--a servile obedience, and supported altogether in her
weakness by the pre-eminence of his fortitude.

He had shewn how the first use of education was to enable us to consult
with the wisest and greatest men on all points of earnest
difficulty,--to use books rightly. Then he uses them to shew how
Shakespeare, Sir Walter Scott, Dante, the Greeks, Chaucer and Spenser
represent women, and altogether Ruskin's ideal girl in Sesame and
Lilies is a very lofty and gracious creature; it may have been
old-fashioned in him to consider her in relation to a lover and to a
husband; we were not accustomed at the time the book was written, to
regard her as an independent wage-earner, and his prescribed course of
education for her is not exactly that required by some of our modern
needs. Yet, what precisely is it? By physical training and exercise to
give splendour of activity and delicate strength--to make her so happy
that her countenance will be full of sweet records, to fill and temper
her mind with knowledge and thoughts which tend to confirm its natural
instincts of justice and refine its natural tact of love. She is not to
be turned into a dictionary, she is to read history with sympathy and
bright imagination. She is to have access to noble books, good art, the
finest models, the same advantages that are given to her brothers. She
also is to learn that courage and truth are pillars of her being. She
also is to have not only noble teaching, but noble teachers, and the
help of wild and fair nature. She is also to learn care for the
untaught and neglected.

"Oh! Ye women of England," he says, "do not think your own children can
be brought into their true fold of rest while these are scattered on
the hills as sheep having no shepherd," and he appeals for the
downtrodden and miserable, "far away among the moorlands and the
rocks--far in the darkness of the terrible streets."

Would a girl so trained be unfitted for right independence? It need not
be assumed that she is quite ignorant of--say arithmetic, or quite
incapable of learning it. Would she be unable to take up gardening,
cooking, sick-nursing, the teaching of gymnastics, or any of the useful
arts which in his later teaching Ruskin insists on? Might she not grow
into a quite valuable factory inspector, or a wise and sympathetic
poor-law guardian?

Ruskin says that boys are "either to ride or sail, to have horse and
dog friends, to have their ears boxed, and heartily too, the first time
they shy a stone at a sparrow, but the father and mother are to put up
(and thank God for the blessed persecution) with his rat and rabbit, and
every conceivable form of vermin a boy likes to bring into the house."
He looks forward to the time when an Eton boy's mind will be "as
sensitive to falseness in policy, as his ear to falseness in prosody";
and on moral questions he remarks, "no advice, no exposure will be of
use, until the right relation exists again between the father and the
mother and their son," which he thus describes: "To deserve his confidence, to keep it as the chief treasure committed in trust to them by God: to be the father his strength, the mother his sanctification,
and both his chosen refuge, through all weakness, evil, danger and
amazement of his young life."

Along all lines of thought for the education of others, is there not a
parallel consciousness that we must educate ourselves? On how much
Ruskin helps to this, we cannot now dwell. I will only say that one of
the articles of St. George's Vow or Creed is this:--"I will strive to
raise my own body and soul daily into higher powers of duty and
happiness: not in rivalship or contention with others, but for the
help, delight and honour of others, and for the joy and peace of my own
life."